Video: ‘Visionaries’, meet James Cameron

This documentary shows James Cameron as a visionary and true entrepreneur, whose movies Titanic and Avatar are the two highest-grossing films in history.

I would like to highlight the following aspects of his vision of things, following the videos.

Curiosity. He describes himself as a geek who as a kid in high school started a science club, with a strong desire of exploration (science fiction books, painting, scuba-diving, etc.). Especially he has the desire of experiencing things that no one has experienced before as a ´privileged witness’, for example through his scientific expeditions in the ocean. “Part of me it’s just a kid that wants to have this amazing adventures”, he says.

Hard work as a competitive advantage. “I think other film makers are inherently more brilliant than me but I know I can work harder than they can, so I beat them that way.” (…) “When you think about the Olympics, a couple of tens of a second makes the difference between you and the guy next to you, and that’s what everybody is there for, and that’s what everybody around the world, billions of people are tuning in to watch… I think of film-making the same way.”

Have fun. He tells how during the shooting of Avatar, he enjoyed the moments in where “nobody knows the answer and we just figure it out… And guess what, when other people come along to make movies like this they are going to look up on page 32 and it’s going to tell them what to do, cause we wrote that page, and that’s cool.” (…) “There is a moment when the fantastic becomes possible, just barely possible… that’s where the fun is.”

Creativity, vision. “A lot of stuff comes to me in dreams”, he says. For instance, he remembers waking up from a dream in college, when he came up with the image of the blue-skinned characters of Avatar. Effectively three decades after he was investing millions of dollars to create an image that came in a dream when he was 18 years old. Technology is almost a tool to make those dreams reality.

Very high standards. “I set my bar, my goals, way higher than are achievable, and then when I fail, I fail at a very high level. Maybe a little demanding but it’s how it works.”